The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 27} LAVA OF LOVE

I try to keep my life simple. After my clumsy sidestep at the strip club, I’m back on track. The power priest calls me every other day, checking up on me, giving me more reading tips, and inviting me to their great all-the-meat-you-can-eat Sunday lunch along with Goodmoondoor and Sickreader. They’re all so proud of me, they can’t take their eyes off of me, looking at me like the farmer at his most promising stud. I’m their guinea pig, the black rat turned white. Torture and Hanna’s kids, a silent girl and two younger boys with big eyes, look at me like the David Beckham of the worshipping world.

I try to smile like the born-again blockhead I am. I’m even shaved close and sporting a short haircut done by Hanna. If I were wearing a tie and holding a Bible, nobody would open their door to me.

“It’s so wonderful to know that you’re working and have a place of your own and everything,” Sickreader says, already sounding like my mother-in-law.

I should invite her over to give me decorating tips.

“Yes. He will be OK. He is a good man,” Hanna says.

I put on the new-me smile. The others look at her in a silent surprise. She probably crossed their line with this one. She quickly adds, turning to me:

“I mean, you were just unlucky. If you were born here in Iceland, you would never have seen war and… you are a new man now. We will just hope that the Americans will not find you.”

They all mumble their yeses and I assure them:

“I think, with my Icelandic passport, I’ll be OK.”

Again a round of nods.

“Yes, Father Friendly did not die in vain,” Torture then proclaims, putting his heavy hand on my shoulder.

The phrase is too difficult for Goodmoondoor to understand. His friend has to explain the words “in vain.” The simple one lights up:

“Yes, he died for Tommy’s sins!”

There you have it. Mr. Christ got the day off and Mr. Friendly stepped into his shoes.

You just have to love this religion. First you shoot 125 people, and once your conscience starts getting bad (around #124), all you have to do is to find someone holy enough to carry your sins. Then you just shoot him and, bang!—he’s off with them to heaven. You never have to see or think about them again.

I’m slowly getting used to my new name. Gun still uses Tod though. She calls a lot. I answer half the time. Wedding is inevitable, I guess, but for the time being I try to keep her at bay. I’m not ready yet. I need to get Munita out of my system, or out of my fridge at least (I sometimes see her head there, between the local milk cartoons and the Polish salami monster). I’m also not sure how well her parents will take it. Saving my life is one thing, but giving me their daughter is another altogether. Most of all, though, I need to finish this fucking therapy.

The ice-girl regularly invites herself for a visit, but I assure her that no woman has ever set foot on this floor, and the sight of a homegrown beauty would undoubtedly set off a riot in the barracks. The Jaroslaws would all burst into my room and get busy with Gun, asking me to hold the camera.

But trying to hold back love is like trying to hold back lava. Running lava that is. One day, when coming back from work, I find the Daybreak Girl sitting out in the kitchen with the Bulgarian mountain of fun. I wonder what they’re talking about. He must be asking her whether any one of her forty lovers was black. I’m surprised that she hasn’t been raped yet. She must be too white for him.

“I told you, you shouldn’t come here. You’re like a lamb in a lion’s den here,” I whisper to her as we walk back to my cell.

“Well, you didn’t want to come and see me, so I had to come and see you,” she says with an ice-cold, gum-chewing smile. She looks casually sexual or sexually casual, depending on which one is better English.

“That guy is dangerous. He’s so lonely he’s like a black hole. He could swallow you up in an instant. What were you talking about?”

“Nothing really. He was just telling me about his family farm. That his mother makes her own jams, and that he used to pick the berries himself or whatever.”

So he’s a berry-picker as well. The greatest disguise is still getting better. We enter my space and there is no more talking for the next forty minutes. For this procedure I have to bring the futon down from its rocky base. We also try to keep our body-sounds down, since, as mentioned before, the walls of my room do not travel all the way up to the ceiling. (The cell sometimes reminds me of a big toilet stall.) I don’t want to risk ending up in the sexual department of Balatov’s brain, being stored away on a shelf, like a jam in a jar, right next to him and Patti LaBelle in the back of her limo.

Then we lie together on the thick mattress, me and my warm Gun, and watch the neon lights and listen to the cars move about on the parking lot below. It’s closing time. The Day 3 Girls in the fancy tile shop and the Indian furniture heaven across the lot are off for the day, shooting car locks with their small key-guns or being picked up by their impatient boyfriends driving black BMWs.

“How do you say Iceland in Icelandic?”

“Ísland.”

“Wow. Sounds like Easeland.”

“Yeah. You got it right.”

“But it doesn’t seem right. You Easelanders never seem to be at ease.”

“You can say that,” says Gunnhildur. “We’re very impatient people. For example, we don’t know how to wait in line. We always wait in a triangle.”

“Why?”

“I think it’s because we’re so few. We don’t know how to wait because we never have to.”

“But I don’t get it why you’re so impatient? I’ve never been to a more relaxing and quiet country.”

“It’s also because we’re so few. Everybody’s trying to act as if they were three different persons. We’re trying our best to make Reykjavik look like New York.”

“Well… you need to work a bit harder then.”

“I’m doing my best. In the morning I’m a waitress, in the afternoon I’m in the office, and in the evenings I’m studying massage.”

“You are? Massage?”

“Yeah. I just started last week.”

I’m on the brink of proposing. We talk about massage for a while. She explains to me the difference between the Swedish and Shiatsu techniques, and I explain to her the difference between regular and full-body massage. Then we lay silent for a bit, until I say:

“Yes, I don’t think I’d like to be a hitman in Iceland.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re so few. I don’t think I could bring myself to shoot.”

She laughs her husky tobacco laughter that evolves into a series of small coughs. They call for a cigarette.

“But how come you’re so few? I mean, you never had any wars.”

“No, but some say that the weather is our war. Ice can be just as deadly as fire.”

The small size of the Icelandic nation is explained by the past, she says, while she fills my room with Gunsmoke. Volcanic eruptions, plagues, and freezing cold winters almost managed to rid the land of its people. The Easelanders didn’t really start flourishing until they got hold of electricity and central heating. In the last fifty years they’ve increased their numbers by 150,000. That’s about as many as got killed in our war. We could have solved the thing by sending them all to Iceland, a land that could easily carry a population of ten or twenty million people. But they would never have allowed them all inside the country, Gunnhildur says. The hitman bows to his fellow men, who would rather see people die than allow them to camp on their lawns.

We talk about the war and Gun continues her cigarette. She asks me about by brother Dario.

“How old was he when he died?”

“He was three years older than me. Twenty-three.”

“Wow. What was he like? Was he like you?”

“No. He was our hero. The favorite son. He was much more fit, looked like a Greek god, was in sports and… He was on the national team in pole vault.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s jumping on a stick. You know Sergei Bubka?”

“No.”

“You don’t? The greatest athlete of all time. Ukrainian guy. He won the gold in Seoul. Dario trained with him for a while. He was his big hero. And it was kind of strange, really, for the same night that Dario was killed, Bubka set a world record. His twelfth or something world record. Six-point-oh-eight meters. In some Russian town. It was like my brother’s soul was helping him out, lifting him up a few more inches. Soul vaulting.”

Fuck. I’m getting too sentimental for this frosty girl.

“Wow. That’s amazing. Did your brother ever go to the Olympics?”

“No. But he would have gone to Atlanta in ninety-six, if…”

I open my eyes as much as I can. Hanging them out to dry, hoping she doesn’t notice. No. She only watches the smoke rise from her übermouth.

“Wow. So he was like, a star?”

“Well, maybe not. Pole vaulting is not that big in Croatia. He was like a shooting star or something.”

I always sound like a lame old lady when I speak of my dead brother. Therefore I never do.

“So it must have been hard for you, to…”

“Actually, it was kind of strange. The death of my brother numbed the fact that I killed my father. Our father.”

“Why? How?”

“It’s like when you accidentally set fire to your house, it’s a bit soothing, or it kind of makes it less bad, to see your neighbor’s house go up in flames as well.”

“But your own brother is more important to you than your neighbor’s ugly house?”

“Of course. Or you can say that the thing with my father blocked me from the blow that the death of my brother would have been to me. You can’t have two MHMs in your life.”

“MHM?”

“Most Horrible Moment.”

“Aha. So the murder of your girlfriend and your road accident was not as horrible?”

“No. But when you rejected me because you thought I was a priest… that was pretty horrible.”

She smiles, before saying:

“But then I found out that you were a serial killer and fell in love with you.”

She laughs. I keep the word “love” between my ears, letting my brain fondle it like a newborn puppy.

“You’re sick,” I say.

“Yes. Lovesick,” she says and then puts out her cigarette in the half empty Gatorade bottle standing on the floor beside the futon and grabs my face. I smile my broken smile. She puts her index finger up to my mouth and replaces the missing tooth with its tip. Eye for an eye, finger for a tooth. She holds it there for a while, smiling, before removing it for a kiss.

She kisses me like an island girl who finds an ugly ship-wrecker on the shore. He’s all bruised and battered, trout-red in the face from a salty sunburn, stiff like a huge piece of meat, and can barely move his tongue. She helps him out.

Between my ears, John Lennon screams out an old Beatles’ number. The one about the warm gun.